David Adesnik | All Articles

David Adesnik

David Adesnik is a visiting fellow at the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on isolationism, national security strategy, and democracy promotion. He is part of AEI’s American Internationalism Project.

Before joining AEI, Adesnik was a research analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses. He has served as deputy director of Joint Data Support at the US Department of Defense, where he focused on the modeling and simulation of irregular warfare and counterinsurgency. Earlier, he spent several months in Baghdad as an operations research and systems analyst for the Coalition Provisional Authority’s counter–improvised explosive device (IED) unit, Task Force Troy during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In 2008, he was part of John McCain’s presidential campaign national security staff. From 2002 to 2009, Adesnik was the coeditor of OxBlog, a blog started with a fellow Oxford University classmate.

A Rhodes scholar, Adesnik has a doctorate and master’s degree in international relations from Oxford University, where he wrote about the democracy promotion efforts of the Reagan administration. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University.

President Obama deserves tremendous praise for closing his State of the Union address with an extended tribute to Army Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg. The president deserves additional praise for maintaining a relationship with Remsburg, whom he met three times before bringing to Washington for the State of the Union. Even a critic of the address called the president’s tribute to Remsburg “heartrending and ennobling.” Yet the tribute to Remsburg took place within a moral and intellectual vacuum. The president sent this brave young man to war, but refuses to take responsibility for doing so. And he refuses to explain to the American public why “the war we must win” has become an afterthought.

Without firing a shot, the United States and the European Union may deliver an embarrassing blow to Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions. Just over two weeks ago, the Ukrainian capital of Kiev erupted in massive protests when President Viktor Yanukovych submitted to Russian pressure and rejected an agreement with the EU widely expected to spur Ukrainian growth after years of stagnation. While focused on the EU pact, the protests are also a means of resistance to Yanukovych's corruption and increasingly authoritarian behavior. The protesters’ top demand is that Yanukovych resign immediately.